IT Manager's 'think Outside The Box' Edict Was, For Once, Not (only) A Revolting Cliché

on call History, it is said, is told by the victors. Which is why The Register each week presents On-Call – tales of readers triumphing when delivering tech support to the clueless, unreasonable or just plain ignorant.

This week's offering is a tale of the latter condition, and kicks off with a reader we'll Regomize as "Remus" who took a gig in the late 1990s at a dotcom company having a crack at the enterprise software market.

Remus signed up as IT manager and, as the company grew, came across some workstations sitting on a carpeted floor in the quality assurance department.

Remus is a bright spark, so his synapses connected and deduced that the combo of carpet and computers would make static electricity a menace.

So he chatted to the QA director about purchasing some anti-static mats to sit under each workstation. A few bucks spent on mats could save thousands in hardware while also protecting productivity.

The mats duly arrived, and the QA director delegated their installation to a junior.

Who placed them under the workstations … without removing them from the cardboard boxes in which they had shipped.

"A couple of days later I walked by the workstations and had to laugh," Remus told The Register.

• Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000
• Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job
• No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them
• No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

So he took the QA director aside and said "Next time you have a job like this, assign it to an engineer who can 'Think out of the box'."

The Register cannot recall a more apt and magnificent deployment of a loathsome corporate cliché.

If you've done as well, or better, click here to send e-mail to On-Call and we may share your tale of triumph here another day. Feel free to push the envelope in pursuit of low-hanging fruit to make a win-win situation for us all. ®